Bitspace launches cloud music app for iPhone

Lots of people are talking about cloud music and music locker services at the moment – the idea of making your music collection available to stream to any device, wherever you are, from a central server. Lots of people are doing it too, launching services to put your tunes in the cloud.

The latest is Bitspace, which launched its iPhone app today. You sign up online, and then have to choose between four different packages. The free version only gives you 500MB of space – barely enough for 10 albums – but if you pay €3.99, €7.99 or €14.99 a month, you get 10GB, 25GB or 50GB respectively.

Once your songs are uploaded, the iPhone app lets you stream them, although there’s an offline mode for when you don’t have a connection. The app runs in the background on iOS 4 devices, and offers features including a playlist of your favourite tracks, artwork from albums, and Last.fm support for ‘scrobbling’ the songs you play.

Cloud locker services can be controversial: many record labels argue that they should be paid licensing fees by any service that lets people store their music on a central server then stream it. Unsurprisingly, many of the cloud startups disagree.